Friday, August 23, 2019

The view from the Airport Flyer

(First published in The Dominion Post, August 22.)

I recently did something every rah-rah cheerleader for
Wellington should do.

I took the Airport Flyer bus from the airport to the railway
station. It’s a trip that presents a very different picture of the city from the
one promoted by the booster brigade for the world’s “coolest capital”.

The problem is not the bus service, as suggested recently by
a local politician, doubtless with his eyes on the forthcoming council
elections. It’s the city itself.

For many visitors, the Airport Flyer provides the first experience
of Wellington, and it’s not an inspiring one. It may be heresy to say this, but
Wellington as seen from the airport bus is grotty.

Note that I say grotty, not
gritty; gritty can be cool, but grotty never is.

The capital has a magnificent front entrance, but the
Airport Flyer approaches the city via its scruffy back yard.

Before going any further, I should stress that I’ve spent
much of my working life in and around Wellington, and there’s a lot about the
city that I love. I’ve proudly shown overseas visitors its better parts.

There remains some truth in the slogan that you can’t beat
Wellington on a good day, but the rarely mentioned qualification to that
statement is that the truly good days come rarely.

The reason Wellington
celebrates them so extravagantly is that its climate is essentially hostile to
human existence.

Much of the time the city is bleak and windblown, as it was
on the day of my Airport Flyer ride. This served only to accentuate the
inconvenient truth that large parts of Wellington look drab, desolate and
neglected.

Our trip begins in Rongotai. There’s been a lot of talk in
recent years about how the presence of Sir Peter Jackson’s film-making empire
has lifted the eastern suburbs, but there’s bugger-all evidence of it in
Rongotai and Kilbirnie.

Mostly the flat eastern suburbs remain what they always
were: areas of mean, low-cost, early 20th century houses jammed too
close together and apparently owned by landlords too stingy to do maintenance
or buy paint. Many have been butchered by cheap and ill-conceived alterations.

The tone lifts as the bus proceeds through Hataitai, one of
my favourite Wellington suburbs, and the quaint Mt Vic bus tunnel is a
treasure. But then you’re through to the other side, and it’s almost Kilbirnie
all over again.

Mt Victoria is supposedly one of Wellington’s most desirable
locations, but you wouldn’t guess it from Pirie St. It’s a clutter of
ill-matching properties, many of them tired, rundown and of little aesthetic or
architectural merit. San Francisco it ain’t.

Cambridge and Kent terraces are an eyesore – a jumble of
cheap, gimcrack commercial buildings cobbled together by opportunist investors and
developers with no concern other than making a buck.

Courtenay Place? It looks even more squalid by day than by
night, when at least the darkness blurs the tattiness. Manners Street is little
better.

It was about this point on my journey that I noticed
something else. The few people on the streets appeared to have purchased their
clothing from op-shops and generally looked demoralised and defeated.

A stranger would have concluded that this was the poor side
of a town that had seen better days – an antipodean Detroit, perhaps – and that
the sad-looking pedestrians shuffling along the footpaths were making their way
to the nearest soup kitchen.

The overall impression created by both the people and the
shabby streetscapes was one of impoverishment. But this was downtown Wellington
– "Absolutely Positively Wellington", the dynamic capital of one of the world’s
most affluent economies. How could this
be?

Earlier that morning I had flown in from Europe where, for
all its supposed problems and stresses, city streets were teeming with life and
exuded energy and positivity, and where dazzling architecture turned my head
around every corner. The contrast was striking – and slightly unsettling.

I know other people who have noted the same thing about
Wellington but are afraid to state it for fear of being howled down.

It’s only when the Airport Flyer gets to Willis Street and
Lambton Quay that the traveller gets any impression of a vibrant and prosperous
city. That’s assuming they haven’t already been so disconcerted by what they’ve
seen that they’ve pressed the “stop” buzzer and taken a cab back to the airport
so they can catch the next plane out again.

Admittedly there’s not a lot that can be done to fix this,
short of re-routing the Airport Flyer around the bays, which would obviously be
impractical. But let’s at least abandon the smug pretence that Wellington is a
glorious gem that instantly bewitches every newcomer.

Yes, bits of it are charming, but much of the city looks tired and unloved to the point of appearing almost derelict. If you don't believe me, take a trip on the Airport Flyer and try to look around with an objective eye.

5 comments:

Too true Karl,I lived 30 years in Wellington and still get down there for family and concerts etc. I do have a soft spot for Welly, but what you have described is exactly true. Much of the town is somewhat old and shabby. Especially the Eastern suburbs. And yes - the weather is bad most of the time. And you left out the bit about all those crazy narrow steep hilly streets. e.g. O.K.road.

We both burst out laughing on reading your article this sunny windless Sunday morning Karl.

We're in Wellington today, and planning to visit the op shops in Miramar. We often get clothes there because they are so new and cheap! The high-income nature of the eastern suburbs -- generated by Jackson's huge workforce -- means the op shops have a lot of high-value wares at op shop prices; and ever-growing crowds of people who have twigged to that. You can barely move for the crowds in them at weekends.

I don't wear them to work but I am wearing them now!

The most infuriating thing about the Airport Flyer is the regional council removing it from the Next Bus displays and stopping Snapper being used on Flyer buses. Both moves were part of the regional council's bizarre deliberate wrecking of what was NZ's best public transport system.

David,You're not telling me a thing. When we lived in Wellington my wife was well-known to the op shops in the eastern suburbs and scored some extraordinary bargains. Her favourite was the Salvation Army shop in Hataitai. But you can wear op shop clothing without it looking like op shop clothing, if you know what I mean. The people I saw from the bus looked like they were dressed by the Wellington City Mission.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.